The last recording of The Cinematologists’ Podcast was at the Electric Palace, Hastings and discussed Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). As usual, it was a stimulating evening. The film was illuminatingly introduced by the guys and the audience discussion was very thought-provoking. So much so that I had a few more thoughts that I am going to share….

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart

1. A “classic film noir” but no-one knew that’s what they were making

The film is very often described as “a classic film noir” – including in the Electric Palace’s publicity for the evening. This is fair enough: much of the look and the feel of the film places it under that banner. Generally, of course, we often introduce and discuss films in terms of their genre.

However, film noir is bit of a special case as, unlike many others, it was not a “self-conscious” genre. At least not in 1950. Nicholas Ray didn’t know he was making a “film noir”. He wasn’t working within any awareness of it as a framework.

The very term betrays its origins within French film criticism and its coining is usually credited to Nino Frank around 1946. French critics like Frank started noticing similarities in style and story between a whole range of American films of the period and dubbed them “films noir”. In fact, it has been suggested that French critics only became of aware of these similarities because they watched a huge backlog of US films very quickly – almost back-to-back - once the Nazi occupation (when Hollywood films had been banned) was over!

Anyway, the point is that the term “film noir” was unknown in the US until the late 1960s when critics, then audiences and then film-makers began embracing it. At the time there was no awareness of its “existence” – nobody had grouped the films together.

The key thing to realise, therefore, is that if Nicholas Ray had been assigned a “western” or a “horror” to direct in 1950 he would have had a reasonable understanding, by then, of that genre’s store cupboard of possible ingredients - in terms of character-types, incident, iconography etc -that he could deploy, mix, ignore or twist. He could also be confident that his audience also had a set of expectations about each genre that he could rely on and use. We could therefore talk confidently about how the film reflects this conscious awareness.

This wasn’t true of the films we now call “film noir”. When talking about "film noir" it is too easy for any of us to forget this and start saying things like “Ray here is using the tropes of noir film…” as if film-makers of the period were consciously working within a known framework

I am not saying that this type of thing was explicitly said in the recording of the podcast but it does frequently happen in the discussion of "film noirs", including In a Lonely Place. (Maybe I am just over-aware of the dangers of these assumptions because I am conditioned by years of teaching film and trying to encourage students not to be too simplistic about noir.)

Thinking about the preceding points I have realised that maybe I am in danger of over-stating the case. Nicholas Ray in 1950 would no doubt have seen many of the previous films now classified as noir – in fact he made some of them (and Bogart, of course, had starred in quite a few of the others!) So perhaps, not necessarily at a conscious level, he could be seen as working within a possible field of influence, let us call it…

2. It’s not just a "film noir"

I think in general a focus on genre can sometimes lead to a reductive “checklist” approach to a film like this. We get bogged down in concentrating on the elements that fit the template of expectations and conventions associated with that genre. This can be very illuminating. In a film like In a Lonely Place it leads us back to questions of context – the original noir films are particularly associated with a very historically specific mood of anxiety and dislocation stemming from a complex of post-war factors: the damaged men returning from battlefields; women liberated by war-time employment, the emergent cold war and McCarthyite paranoia and so on. We can certainly detect traces of all these in the film.

However, it does mean that some of the discussion of the film tends to only focus on its “noir”-ness and downplays or ignores features of the film that don’t fit the template.

The case of In a Lonely Place I think there is a lot more to uncover and discover about the film than just its noir status. As with so many (all?) films there is all sorts of hybridity going on – mixing the elements of other genres like romance, romantic comedy (even “screwball comedy”), “suspense” (which is how the film was described in its publicity at the time), procedural crime etc. There is a signal focus too on the idea of a dangerous man (a “homme fatale”) which is rarely found in the rest of the films usually assigned to the noir label.

This is part of a bigger question of how useful genre is as a way of approaching any film.

2. A product of not just its time but its industry

In the end, of course, genres don’t make films, film companies do (at least in the commercial sector). A film, even in 1950, is an expensive risk and therefore the films that are made can be usefully understood as attempts to minimise the chances of them making a loss.

We can, therefore, identify the factors about In a Lonely Place that enabled it to be made: Ray’s track record as a reliable director, Bogart’s huge fan-base and a popular novel as its (distant) source. These are the sorts of elements that enabled the making of many Hollywood films of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. However, I would argue that two factors about the American film industry in 1950 made it possible for this film specifically to exist and to exist in its actual surprising final form (the downbeat ending, the “anti-hero” protagonist etc).

One would be the breakup of the Studio System. Thanks to US Government anti-trust legislation (the 1948 Paramount Decrees) the old majors were withdrawing from the factory-style production they’d practiced for years. Stars, directors and others were being released from their old restrictive studio contracts and some were using their power and money to start their own independent production companies. Which is exactly what Bogart did in forming Santana Productions (named after his yacht).

One of Santana’s films was, of course, In a Lonely Place. Bogart chose the film, the director (an old friend, apparently) and approved the script. Ray and Bogart were therefore enjoying a degree of creative autonomy (cushioned by Bogart’s bankability and loyal audience) relatively unknown in the studio era. They could try new things such as challenging star and story expectations.

Incidentally, a few small independent film production companies had existed in the studio system era – mostly surviving by providing the low-budget B-pictures that went with the majors’ A-pictures in double bills. Interestingly, these “poverty row” companies are sometimes seen as one of the cradles of what would become known as “film noir”. Also, to give another example to Dario’s (on the podcast) list of links between "film noir" and the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard dedicated A Bout de Souffle to one such B-picture company making “proto-noir”- Monogram Pictures.

Secondly, in parallel there was also the accelerating decline of the cinema audience. In 1946 weekly US attendances had peaked at 83m per week. By 1950 it was down to 60m and dropping. The main reason of course was the effects of TV (by 1950 The Ed Sullivan Show was already 2 years’ old). As is well known the history of Hollywood ever since (or at least until recently) has been the history of attempts to draw people away from their sofas by doing things that TV couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Famous examples from the 1950s include the transition to colour, experiments like 3-D and smell-vision etc and, eventually, the development of teen-pics aimed at the section of the audience who were still turning up to the cinemas (which, of course, Ray would benefit from a few years later with Rebel without a Cause).

In the case of In a Lonely Place it could be an early example of writers, directors and producers realising that one way to try to compete with TV is to provide something more challenging, downbeat and “adult” than the safe and sanitised “family entertainment” TV provided. (I wonder too if there was an awareness that amongst the audience were many men who had returned from the horrors of war who wouldn’t be satisfied with glamour or simple escapism?).

These two industrial factors combine in a freedom and push for something different that results in such an interesting and odd film which in some ways prefigures some of the even more challenging films of the 1960s (starting with Psycho).

3. The Gaze of Laurel Grey

Academic discussion of gender and film is still very much dominated by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In it she argued that Hollywood and its cinematography adopted a “male gaze” at their female characters:

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

This can be seen in countless films up until the present day, including many films falling under the film noir label. For instance, in Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) when our hapless protagonist Walter first encounters femme fatale Phyllis the camera cuts to his point-of-view of her semi-clad body and then her legs coming downstairs.

Against this background, one of the interesting things about In a Lonely Place is how powerful and independent Laurel’s gaze is, especially in the first half of the film.

There’s the way Laurel returns Dix’s appraising gaze that first night. There’s also the way she turns and stares at him in the police station the next morning – long, hard and with self-possession. It feels quite unusual to have a female character be so in control and bold in their looking (and, apparently deriving some “visual pleasure” from it).

4. A rare example of direct address

There is also a very interesting moment that I hadn’t really appreciated until I saw it again on the big Electric Cinema screen. When Mildred, the doomed hat-check girl, begins telling Dix the story of Althea Bruce at his apartment the camera cuts to a Point-of View (POV) shot from Dix’s position. The protagonist’s POV is a standard device in Hollywood films, attempting to build audience identification with the “hero” – literally seeing things through their eyes.

However, in this case the object being viewed is not just being looked at– they are talking directly to the protagonist which means that Mildred is directly addressing the camera and thereby us. This is interesting because it is such a rare example – I was always taught that directors of the “classic period” avoided it (except in comedies) because it breaks the 4th wall, reminds the audience of the camera etc. (This supercut https://vimeo.com/60845952 shows examples and nearly all are from the 1960s on, except – interestingly a moment from Sunset Boulevard). Maybe this is another example of Ray flexing his creative freedoms in a new post-studio era?

5. An architect’s eye

Profiles of Ray often point out that he studied architecture (with Frank Lloyd Wright) and that the visual design (“mise-en-scene” as those French critics called it) of his films often showed a careful attention to how sets and their décor can be used to create mood and give the audience subtle clues to characters and relationships.

One example is the design of Dix’s apartment and its extraordinary metal grilles – internally and externally.

More generally, throughout the film are countless shots of gates, grid patterns, plaids and checks – all perhaps communicating a sense of entrapment and the barriers between characters. Which actually brings us back full circle. Grids, bars, barriers are often seen as one of the key visual motifs of “classic film noir”!

Peter Blundell taught Film Studies in Further and Adult Education and recently retired as Curriculum Leader for Media as Sussex Downs College, Lewes. He tweets as @peterablu and is on Instagram as thirstierwater.

If you are interested in writing for The Cinematologists Blog please email us at cinematologists@gmail.com with your idea.

There is something enigmatic and appealing about donkeys. This axiom, asserted by Kathy Hubbard, director of Shetland Arts Screenplay Film Festival in Shetland in her introduction to festival hit Donkeyote (2017), was met with murmurs and nods of approval from a packed audience. But why should this be the case? Maybe it’s aesthetic: the floppy ears, the melancholy gait, the toothiness preceding that elemental bray. Or is it something more ineffable? Stoic reliability, unswerving companionship, a kind of existential absurdity, or are donkeys merely a symbol of life's long, hard precarious journey? In case you think I might be overdoing the hyperbole, such allusions are palpable in the form of Gorrión, the equine star of Chico Pereira’s poetic, poignant, amusing and, of course, quixotic film.

The human protagonist of Donkeyote, Manolo (the uncle of the director), is less an embodiment of the knight-errant and more a fusion of Cervantes’ eponymous hero and his ironic sage Sancho Panza. Living simply in southern Spain, Manolo personifies a history of romantic ambulation through nature in harmonious, even mystical accord, with his dog, Zafrana and beloved donkey. His tireless marching onwards is seemingly an existential drive but at 73 and with failing health, Manolo plans a final adventure following the Trail of Tears, an iconic passage forced upon the Native American Cherokee Nation, 2000 miles, East to West across America. But not without Gorrión. Reactions to this hare-brained scheme, incredulity from his daughter Paquita - “America? America? AMERICA? she exclaims in disbelief - and barely veiled derision from travel agents and other bureaucrats, point to a central theme: the boundaries imposed by the modern age.

Shots of man and beast coming up against all forms of barriers permeate the film. The physical ones - wire fences, roads, train lines, rivers – are negotiated (or not) in various ways. One of the most comedic scenes stems from Gorrión’s reluctance to cross the water on to a ferry; Manolo’s vexed impatience turns to jovial resignation and then empathetic coaxing. But perhaps the more telling obstacle is that of communication. The trials of learning English, shooting a video appeal for money for the trip, and the conspiratorial rejections of officials whose obstructive mind-set can in no way grasp the romance of this dream, imbue a tragi-comic tone. Manolo embraces the technologies of communication, he is no luddite, but the more channels he explores the further he seems from his ultimate goal. The encroachment of technological development is a recurrent visual metaphor that reflects how the natural freedom of the environment is compromised by modernity's striation of space. A simple trek with one's donkey thus becomes an Odyssian endeavour.

Pereira’s intellectually ironic style with neorealist echoes is evident in his debut film Pablo’s Winter (2012), but this latest project is layered with a personal undercurrent which, on the one hand, gives the film its depth, drama and humour, but on the other opens up questions about cinema as document. There is nominally an observational relationship between filmmaker and subject yet the dramatic situations and visual compositions have clear structure and arrangement for us to witness. So, in one sense the director remains at a distance; no voice-over or explicitly questioning interjection seeks explanation (only at one moment, when Manolo wakes up in genuine pain, is the observational illusion explicitly broken). Yet there is a subtle complicity between Pereira and his uncle that emerges though the film's formal approach. A glint of awareness in the eye of Manolo suggests he is very much in on the yarn.

Furthermore, the film is cut in such a way that reaction shots of Gorrión, along with his endearing antics, invite us to project an anthropomorphism. And close-ups using a wide-angle lens evoke a deep connection between man and animal. There could be an accusation that this is not documentary at all, but a kind of fictionalisation of authenticity. Realist rather than reality. Yet, to me, Donkeyote possesses a knowing sensibility which deliberately transcends the porous boundaries between fact and fiction. Pereira's work can therefore be aligned with the post-Oppenheimer tendency in documentary; filmmakers actively challenging the mechanics of documentary form and even puncturing the false dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity.

This is a film that can be easily taken as a low-key, heartwarming tail of an eccentric old adventurer's symbiotic relationship with his donkey. But a slightly deeper look offers meditations on the man's relationship to nature, the boundaries imposed by modernity, and even the essential nature of communication and companionship.

Dario speaks to the producer of Donkeyote in Episode 51 of The Cinematologists Podcast.

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An old VHS copy of Pulp Fiction I used to own was prefaced by an interview with Quentin Tarantino in which he introduces the film along with presenting two extended scenes that were cut from the final edit. In the days before DVDs, with extras an integral part of the product, a videotape with bonus material was quite novel. Among a slew of statements, intoned with the signature staccato delivery, one nugget of Tarantino wisdom lodged itself firmly in my consciousness: “There are two kinds of movie lovers. Those who love the movies that they love, and those who just love movies”. Tarantino goes onto suggest that he is undoubtedly the later, loving movies of all kinds and implying that this ethos is the grounding for authentic cinephilia. As an overly serious film undergraduate, imbued with the austere pretentiousness of a mature student, this statement seemed like a rarefied kernel of cinematic sagacity. Indeed, it is a maxim that underpinned my own film education & journey through academia, and has recently come back into my thoughts in the context of contemporary film culture.

Embracing all that cinema offers should not be viewed as some grand gesture, it must be at the core of the film lover's very being. Therefore, the colossal abundance of film watching possibilities in the today’s digital culture, available through myriad delivery platforms, would seemingly offer a cinephilic utopia. Yet, if you are anything like me, it often feels as though this abundance borders on the oppressive, fostering the anxiety that one is perennially behind the curve when it comes to cine-literacy. Paradoxically however, the excess of choice one is confronted with betrays a reductionist, formulaic tendency, as though a nebulous, clandestine authority is pummelling you with infinite varieties of the same product. Could it be that the open-access zeitgeist of immediacy and availability actually produces docile, insular consumers who only love the films they love?

I recently completed an online survey investigating digital platform use. As you might imagine I am an extensive user. I have accounts with Netflix, Amazon Prime and MUBI, and regularly pay for one-off downloads from Curzon Home Cinema, iTunes and Google Play, as well as viewing through BBC iPlayer and YouTube. This round up omits any crossing over into the moral abyss of deliberate piracy (which of course I would never do). Though I like to think that I possess a discerning critical taste and in-depth knowledge of cinema that allows me to navigate the labyrinth of content, such immediacy and choice can imbue strange cocktail of angst, apathy and ambivalence. Scrolling through reams of titles the search itself becomes an existential labour: how will this selection define me? What is my mood? How will this next choice expand my cultural horizons? What can help me escape? I’ll just watch something I know I’ll like. You choose. I often wonder what kind of time gets racked-up just in the very process of trying to make up one's mind.

Pointedly, the lists of titles on streaming services are increasingly taxonomised less by the classical distinctions of genre and more by algorithmic association: because you watched this, then you might like this. Such digital tailoring of taste might on the surface seem like a benign effort to personalise our experience as viewers, pandering to our sense of unique self-identity. But make no mistake, it is based on the ruthless logic of online consumer retention; the longer we are plugged in, the more economic and informational value can be extracted. The counter-intuitive notion that despite our information-rich environment we exist in an enclosed eco-system, is now a familiar criticism of the effect of the internet, particularly in terms of the ideological viewpoints and political interpretations we are exposed to. This can also be applied to a cultural world in which there is seemingly a constellation of possibilities but where invisible arbiters are nudging us back into a safety zone of manageable, efficient consumption. One might conceive that this algorithmic ring-fencing not only ferments an illusion of choice but dulls the cognitive abilities to engage with a wide range of cultural forms.

The multiplex era certainly hasn’t hastened the diverse exhibition utopia that some had promised and many had hoped for. In recent years, franchise filmmaking has further ingrained a viewing sensibility predicated on familiarity and repetition. Event films are so frequent and so hyped, they dominate screen time sucking up all the oxygen of publicity, yet the balloon of anticipation invariably deflates under the weight of lukewarm reviews and social media anti-climax. Furthermore, the commercialisation of fan culture has created a tick-box viewing mentality and completest fetishism through which the sharpness of critical faculties become blunted against the granite of homogeneity. The more I think about it the more Tarantino’s comparison between “those that love the movies they love" and "those who just love movies” seems to parallel the difference between fans and cinephiles. Of course, one can be both, however, today's culture of abundance, not to mention the majority of online discourse around film, is set up to cater to, and perhaps exploit, the insatiable market of fan specificity.

Teaching film in higher education it is at times dismaying to realise the narrowness of students’ viewing vocabulary. Indeed, over the years introducing students to as many aspects of cinema as possible has become increasingly fundamental to the role. But even more worrying is when you get the sense that there is an unwillingness to venture out of what they know and know they love. In the pre-internet dark ages of three/four terrestrial channels, it was through television that I became aware of different forms of film. Watching late screenings on BBC 2 and Channel 4 I didn't know what independent, art-house, experimental or 'world' cinema was. What I was seeing just seemed strange, visceral, illicit, shocking, beautiful and authentic. Curated seasons like Moviedrome, in-depth critical analysis Scene by Scene, and centrality of the late Barry Norman’s Film [insert year] provided a quasi-film education. Because of the lack of film viewing options, even during the nascent VHS rental era television, in retrospect, now seems like it was a complement to cinema rather than I rival to it.

The digital transformation is often aligned with a politics of democratisation, where the elite boundaries of high and low culture are dissolved through a rejection of gatekeepers, critics, curators or any elitist who tells you what you should watch and like. Expert induced ennui seems to be a condition of the times, but within many strands of the arts, one can detect a backlash against a kind of cultural flattening in which populism and the logics of the market are assumed to produce an objective superiority to the subjective relativity of critical judgement. A.O. Scott's latest book, for example, Better Living through Criticism, mounts a staunch defence of not only the professional film critic, but criticism itself, as a way of offering contextual and aesthetic anchoring points from which we might negotiate a more complex, layered, even truthful relationship to the cultural world.

Ruminating on these issues, I am very much aware of fighting an internal contradiction: In no way am I proposing, in some dream of omnipotence, shutting off the internet and imposing what I might deem an appropriate regime of film viewing. Indeed, I feel like a Luddite even suggesting that the brave new world of cultural abundance may be actually curtailing a sense of intellectual curiosity. But it is perhaps accurate to say that we increasingly need to find or construct mechanisms, both instrumental and psychological, that help us to cut through the noise and forge a cultural cognitive map. I am lucky enough to have access to university resources, local independent cinemas, a network of cine-literate friends, colleagues & students, and produce a film podcast, all of which provide structures that furnish and inspire a love of the film in its most eclectic sense. But I still often feel somewhat trapped by the tyranny of limitless content. Whatever strategies one might employ for negotiating the joys and travails of a plentiful cinematic universe, finding ways of looking beyond what is immediately presented to you is the first imperative move. In the digital age, intellectual curiosity is something that actually might need to be worked on a little more than we might realise, particular if one aspires to the simple yet clear aim: just love movies.

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Werner Herzog has always been a curious director. Puzzled by the world and eager to encounter its mysteries, Herzog’s inquisitive eye routinely pits the enigmas and harsh realities of the outside world against the human psyche and material body. From German deaf-blind communities to Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and from the Kuwait oil fires to Alaska’s grizzly bears, Herzog’s documentaries in particular revolve around curious case studies that aim to unsettle our grip on the world. When at their best, these documentaries foreground the question of life itself: if the outside is quite so unlivable and so obscene then how do humans continue to live in it? As Herzog puts it early on in his career, miming Martin Heidegger’s fundamental question of metaphysics, “why is there Being at all, rather than Nothing?” The power of Herzog’s work often derives from the ways in which it intensifies this uncanny experience of human life, an effect that Gilles Deleuze once described as Herzog’s obsession with opposing the small and the large, the human against the sublime.

Werner Herzog is also curious as a director. A routinely self-mythologising figure, his signature brand of dour, Bavarian-inflected English has taken on a bizarre resonance in the internet age. Recent celebrity voice-over turns and cameos in Parks and Recreationand The Simpsons have provoked critics to either become protective of his supposed “genius” or lament his turn towards superficial self-aggrandising. But to chastise Herzog’s memeification is to forget that self-mythologisation has always been part of the director’s modus operandi. From Of Walking in Ice (1978)to his conversations with Paul Cronin – republished in 2015 as A Guide for the Perplexed – Herzog has long cultivated an image of himself as a semi-fictional character. It is odd then, that critics of his recent films have tended to focus quite so sharply on the director’s apparently newfound celebrity, when it has been so much a part of the director’s deliberately constructed mystique.

Herzog in The Simpsons

One problem with curiosity, though, is that it often leaves politics behind. For if the world is thought of as merely a curiosity – a thing to be looked at, admired or probed – then it also becomes a static object, a museum artefact rather than something that is constantly being reshaped. This might explain why there is a darkly comic nihilism that pervades Herzog’s documentaries; curiosities do not often demand political or ethical responsibility from their viewers. But just as Herzog treats the world as a curiosity, the same relation holds for Herzog’s critics. It has become something of a commonplace to treat Herzog as a curiosity, as a masculine adventurer expounding comic faux-philosophy, always more important than the films themselves. Reviews of his later work, tinged as they are with sardonic laziness, have become a rather predictable affair: begin by talking about the director’s obsessive cinematic vision, provide a few sentences on the “ecstatic truth” of Herzog’s infamous Minnesota Declaration, and don’t forget to mention he once ate his shoe.

If Herzog’s documentaries tend to leave politics behind then what do they interrogate in its place? This is where Deleuze’s notion of the small and the large enters the frame. What the French philosopher identified some thirty years ago is the way that Herzog’s films capture a sublime natural-historical struggle between the individual human and the overwhelming scale of the world. This is why Herzog’s 1992 documentary Lessons of Darkness is quite so controversial: here the aftermath of the Gulf War is abstracted from its particular geopolitical reality into an apocalyptic narrative of the end of the world itself. Herzog thus transforms the specific event into a metaphor: the oil fires are no longer just oil fires, they are also a grand battle between life and death. On the one hand then, Lessons of Darkness depoliticises and indeed forgets the Gulf War entirely; but on the other hand, the film might be saved from itself if we were to say that the Gulf War was quite literally the end of the world for the thousands of Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians who died. Such interplay between the curious and the sublime are in evidence throughout Herzog’s work.

Lessons of Darkness (Herzog, 1992)

A critique of his late period documentaries might suggest that the sublime scale of the large overwhelms his attention to the detail of the small. However, traces of Herzog’s magnetic, naïve curiosity take on new shape in what I suggest are pointed moments of refusal, specifically, Herzog’s refusal to indulge the audience’s curiosity. This idea animates one of the most famous scenes in Grizzly Man (2005), a film which focuses on the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell. In the film Herzog interviews Jewel Palovak, a close friend of Treadwell’s, who owns his VCR and with it the hundreds of hours of audiovisual footage that Treadwell recorded when in Alaska. The recordings culminate in Treadwell’s death itself: with the lens-cap left on, though, all that is captured is the horrifying audio of Treadwell and his girlfriend Amy Huguenard being mauled to death by a grizzly bear.

Herzog makes a crucial decision here not to include this audio in his film. Instead, the director films himself listening to the audio alone, headphones on. But this is not quite an accurate description. To put it more precisely, the scene begins with the director filming himself, but then the camera slowly starts to zoom over Herzog’s shoulder, leaving him behind and focusing instead on Palovak’s body language as she watches Herzog listening. Grizzly Man therefore reaches its crescendo at precisely its quietest moment: silence becomes more powerful than spectacle. What begins as merely another scene in which Herzog indulges his own curiosity transforms into one of the most complicated, enigmatic and perhaps even ethically attuned of Herzog’s oeuvre. Here Herzog’s refusal to feed the audience’s desire for spectacle, in fact, provokes a more intense mode of captivation.

Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005)

2016 saw the release of two new Herzog documentaries: first, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a film about the birth and development of the Internet; and second, Into the Inferno, a globetrotting study of active volcanoes, co-directed with the University of Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer. Both of these films redeploy a number of typical “Herzogian” motifs – quotable monologues, rehearsed but nevertheless naturalistic interviews, unexpected thematic and geographical detours – as well as a tendency to depoliticise and abstract their subject matter into mere curiosity. In Lo and Behold, for instance,Herzog is not at all interested in the numerous political critiques of Elon Musk’s techno-utopian plans to colonise Mars. Instead he puts himself first in line for the mission: “I would come along. I wouldn’t have a problem. One way ticket. I’ll be your candidate.”

Lo and Behold (Herzog, 2016)

A subtle moment of refusal, however, is at the centre of Lo and Behold. One of the film’s numerous case studies features the Catsouras family, whose daughter Nikki died in a car accident in 2006. The family’s grief is riven with anger at the onlookers, dispatchers, and internet trolls who shared horrifying images of their daughter’s disfigured body. Despite the strange rigidity of the scene – filmed with oppressive lighting, and with the family awkwardly positioned like a row of mannequins – Herzog cultivates and then cuts off our curiosity: “Hoping to avoid a new wave of sick curiosity, we are here not even showing a picture of Nikki alive, only a place in the house she liked.” As if to deliberately counteract the dark desire to see, Herzog instead leaves the camera lingering on an empty room.

Lo and Behold (Herzog, 2016)

Despite his concerns with an altogether different geographical and conceptual terrain, the Herzog of Into the Inferno also refuses to let his curiosity get the better of him. When asked by his co-director Clive Oppenheimer whether he wants to descend into a volcano, to get as close as possible to the lava below, Herzog replies with an unequivocal no. It would be entirely stupid, he says, to risk his life for an image: “I am the only one in filmmaking who is clinically sane.” The irony is very much intended. It is strange to think of Herzog as a precautionary filmmaker, not least because the aura that has been manufactured over the years – by both Herzog himself and by his critics – always tends to emphasise the danger and risk of his cinematic exploits. But what Herzog’s late documentaries show us is that, despite his longstanding penchant for curiosity, there is an overriding sense in which his films are never quite reducible to their excessive and adventurous motifs. Rather, the most gripping moments of Herzog’s later films are those in which curiosity is obscured, withheld, or completely refused, in a move that uses the sharpness of the small to pierce the depth of the large.

Dominic O'Key is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Leeds. He wrote his my MA dissertation on Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and has a chapter on Herzog and crocodiles coming out later this year in a book on animals and biography. He can be contacted via email: dominic.okeys@gmail.com. Follow Dominic on Twitter: @oquays.

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Lately, I have been experiencing a sense of inhibiting apprehension when attempting to write about cinema. Writer’s block is not an accurate description, more a deeply demotivating ambivalence. This psychological barrier has taken the form of a self-reflexive need to justify the value of writing about film, the art form I love, rather than just getting on a doing it. These struggles emerge from a deleterious sense that film, in these uncertain times, does not warrant the energy, attention or emotional investment that any kind of critical or contextual writing requires. The uncertain climate has, for me, brought into stark view both the realities of the divisive culture in which we live and broached questions about what should our roles be as social actors and citizens. Part of that is the recognition of choices we have in how we devote our time. Therefore to focus one’s critical attention on film has recently felt like indulging the privilege of burying one’s head in the sand. The philistine mantra of “it’s only a film” is one that cinephiles of all persuasions are used to defending against, but the spectre of this maxim has haunted my recent attempts to get thoughts onto the page.

Efforts to overcome these intellectual boundaries have been further impaired by a self-imposed sense of obligation. That I am somehow duty-bound to produce a far-reaching explanatory opus that restates the value of cinema in the present moment, which, once completed, will free me to make highly articulate and socially relevant interventions. These justificatory knots are also tightened by an awareness of the no so latent narcissism of this entire mindset. There is no escape from the fact that my comfortable life has, compared to most people, barely felt a ripple of disturbance due to the recent political carnage (although I do foresee that changing). I smell the malodorous whiff of pomposity and self-regard even suggesting that my pronouncements warrant such symbolic gnashing of teeth. This nexus of doubts and equivocations have, over several months, undermined many attempts to get back in the writing saddle. This, then, is the result of a more stream of consciousness process, starting with a version forcibly jotted down in a notebook to try overcome the mental blockage.

Such internal dilemmas have been all the more frustrating for two more material reasons. Firstly, I have been intending to start a new written blog on The Cinematologists website for some time. This aspiration became even more pressing in my mind after a discussion between myself and my co-host Neil about the implications of the current political carnage during our recent Robocop episode. Questions about the point of film criticism and analysis, the status of cinema in the cultural landscape, and how one might attempt to shape one’s own subjectivity to find a sense of value in film as a vocation, have been central to our podcast discourse from its inception. Indeed, starting the podcast was perhaps an implicit reaction to such undercurrents. Secondly, I have seen many films over the last year or so that have been fascinating and inspiring as singular examples of cinematic artistry. This reaffirmed my belief that film, as much as any art form, retains a vitality and significance in interrogating the fundamental relationship between society, culture and human experience.

Two films from last year particularly - Son of Saul (László Nemes) and Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) - have lodged in my mind. They are at opposing ends of the cinematic spectrum in both form and content but they both epitomise the experiential and intellectual value of film in addressing the light and the dark of human condition. There are unique stories unfolding in specific social contexts but they evoke universal themes regarding the interrelationship between social structure and the nature of being. Nemes’ brutally unrelenting holocaust drama, an atrocity that has been extensively depicted in film, forges an uncompromising level of intimacy with evil. The story of an Auschwitz prisoner who is one of the Sonderkommandos (inmates who empty the gas chambers of bodies and salvage valuables), is a harrowing in its immediate depiction, but even worse when you attempt to contemplate it. Saul (Géza Röhrig) thinks he recognises his son among the dead and is determined, despite the ever-present mortal risk, to give him a religious burial. Aesthetically striking is the use of close-up, a rudimentary yet quintessential visual tool, it acts in the film as a forensic lens, counterintuitively pushing the horrors of death to the periphery of the frame and focusing remorselessly on the gaunt face of the protagonist. We see in minute detail how the mask of stoicism betrays a crushing fear fused with resignation. The close-up symbolically traps Saul but also the audience. The claustrophobic pressure of the framing negates the space to retreat and distance one’s self from Saul's ipseity; the film insists that the viewer confronts the heinousness of humanity.

Géza Röhrig in Son of Saul

In contrast, Paterson is a film which allows the viewer to escape into a milieu that unapologetically romanticises the everyday. However, this elegant story of a local bus driver who writes deeply personal poetry during the liminal breaks in his routine, touches on the sublime without tipping over into cliché or sentimentality. It conjures up the singular and explicit pleasures to be found in aesthetic beauty, be it poetry or cinema. But even more impressively the direction amalgamates these two forms in a manner that does justice to their visual and textual roots while idealising the innocent process of creation. Indeed, the lesson that the creative journey is not a means to a definitive goal, but a way of making sense of our solitude offers that fleeting, redemptive chance of connection. A film about the beauty in the everyday, the profundity in the simplest conversation, and the search for acceptance could be painfully saccharine especially but Paterson's wistfulness is more like a cleansing breath of cinematic oxygen. If Son of Saul is the bleakest warning cinema can evoke, where humanity is stripped down to the elemental, existential choice: life or death, Paterson makes the prosaic poetic by reminding us that connection and love are found within our search, not at its end.

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Paterson

Although this article has in no way assuaged all my doubts, it has provided a sounding board that will instigate further questions, and hopefully some answers, in the entries to come. That is my hope and intention. Certainly, just by invoking the effect that two superb films had on me, I have regained a certain clarity as to the vital role the cinema, and art, in reflecting on and challenging the human experience. In the end, it is artistic expression, in whatever form that takes, in its creation, experience, and even criticism, that helps to centre our subjectivity and orient it in relation to others. That is its value, and it cannot be understated.

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